'Geis' is a word from Irish mythology meaning a supernatural taboo or injunction on behaviour. In her long-awaited third collection, Caitríona O'Reilly examines the 'geis' in all of its psychological, emotional, and moral suggestiveness: exploring the prohibitions and compulsions under which we sometimes place ourselves, or find ourselves placed. In poems that range from the searingly personal to the more playfully abstract and philosophical, O'Reilly's characteristic imaginative range and linguistic verve are everywhere in evidence. These are poems that question our sometimes tenuous links with the world, with others, and even with ourselves, but which ultimately celebrate the richness of experience and the power of language to affirm it. Geis is Caitríona O’Reilly's third collection. It won the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2016, and was shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize. It follows her critically acclaimed earlier books, The Nowhere Birds (2001), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and The Sea Cabinet (2006), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation which was also shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award.

"Geis is an outstanding achievement. It is intense, intelligent and finely-crafted poetry which is both self-examining and dazzled... by the word and the world’s beauty. It is contemporary Irish poetry at its finest." - judges of the Irish Times Poetry Now Award

"I first came across her poetry in The Sea Cabinet, a book that has the beauty and strength of a blue whale in its reach for the depths of experience and celebration of language as if it were oxygen. Geis (meaning “taboo” in Irish mythology) promises more sharp observations of nature both human and not, plus it features a poem called 'Iceland'." - The Independent (Best Summer Reads 2015)

"O’Reilly has what so few poets have: a language all of her own, so much so that any image or line is instantly recognisable as hers." - Guardian (Books of the Year)